The drill: the loss reproduced on the shipped v0.229.0 before anything was built. 120 082 104 B ->
7 036 B in one Tier-2 run, recorded as a success. Phases 1a (before), 1b (the hollow primary,
produced through the R-102 restore path exactly as the 2026-08-31 observation was), 1c (the loss),
1d (repair).
scripts/read_credential.py is Part 4's rider, and it exists because a note did not work three times:
2026-07-20 a Failed login was diagnosed as a stale password and written into memory; 2026-08-31 the
same misreading recurred and was caught; 2026-08-31, hours later, it recurred AGAIN and rewrote a
live box's password hash. Between them the project already had a memory file stating the rule, a
worked recipe in it, and a session report describing the mistake. The rule now lives in the code
path: one matching quote pair is unwrapped, the result is REFUSED if it still carries a quote, and
--expect-length gives the caller a second opinion. The value goes file->file at 0600 and stdout gets
only its length. test_read_credential.py asserts each refusal by its reason, with a positive control
before believing the not-in-stdout result.
Red-proof E1: remove the final quote assertion -> three cases fail by name.
